Celebrating ten years of specialized training, the Walloon Training Center for jobs in the chemical and biopharmaceutical industry (CEFOCHIM) located in Seneffe, Belgium, is maintaining its reputation for specialized training with the exciting inauguration of its new biopharmaceutical training wing endowed with sterile white rooms.

Responding to the development of the biopharmaceutical industry in Wallonia, the €1.700.000 investment of the new biopharmaceutical wing of Cefochim, co-financed by Forem and FEDER as well as by other sectorial training funds, has resulted in a new complex extending over more than 600 m² among which 200 m² are dedicated to 3 white rooms.

The totally aseptic rooms are similar to those currently found in the industry and are the first of its kind in Belgium. The dynamics of these rooms will allow for specialized training of workers within the sectors, qualified job-seekers as well as for biopharmaceutical professors by creating real life situations in a sterile environment.

In 2003, Essenscia Wallonia, the federation for chemical industries and life sciences, and the labor unions joined together to create Cefochim in an effort to respond to the need for training of highly qualified staff required by companies in the respective sectors. In 2006, Forem joined the team so as to offer state-of-the-art training to job-seekers.

BioWin, within its skills development activities and more particularly within its BioPharE project, has also been working in partnership with CEFOCHIM for many years to offer new training programs aiming at enhancing cross-disciplinary abilities to boost Walloon companies’ competitiveness. FOCUS, a training program dedicated to all operational aspects (in R&D, innovation, clinical development, production, quality, regulatory affairs, process management, intellectual property, marketing, sales, etc.), was born from this fruitful collaboration.

“This new biopharmaceutical wing is an exceptional tool which is going to allow [us] to meet the needs of biopharmaceutical companies”.
Bernard Broze, President of CEFOCHIM and Managing Director of Essenscia Wallonia.

“We do know that companies active in the Health sector in Wallonia are to going to face recruitment challenges in the coming years. Creating a training environment which reproduces real life working conditions is the best way to provide companies that are developing cutting-edge technologies with highly qualified and operational people” Rose-May Delrue, BioPharE Project Manager at BioWin. Between 2011 and 2012, FOCUS provided 27,000 training hours and attracted 2,400 people!

Since its creation, CEFOCHIM has demonstrated a growing success with the hours of training exploding from 3,000 hours in 2003 to 130,000 hours in 2013, with trainings comprising: production, maintenance and laboratory technicians; and operators of production in pharmacy and cell culture in particular in the chemistry and life science sectors.

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The Health Cluster of Wallonia.
The BioWin Cluster, focuses on human health. Its ambition is to bring together all the Walloon stakeholders committed to promoting innovation and training in the field of biotechnology in health care with the following objectives...
www.biowin.org